Pages

Friday, 18 November 2011

OK, so nothing's actually finished yet, but I thought you might be interested to see how they're coming along. Here's the initial 4 point warband. The Warlord in the centre, flanked by his hearthguard with (ghostly) rabble behind.

A closer shot of the Warlord and the right wing.

And the left wing.

As you can see the Warlord and Hearthguard are ready for the dip, but as it's rather smelly I'll wait until I've done the Warriors then dip the whole lot in one go.

The figures are Gripping Beast plastics (Warlord and Hearthguard) and Musketeer (Warriors). In fact, the Warriors are actually from the Early Saxon range but I'll give them mostly larger shields so they'll be fine for 9th-11th century warriors.

Sunday, 6 November 2011

I'll start with a quick apology for the blog being so quiet for so long. This has been due to raft of recent real-life stuff, holidays and more recently being rather poorly.

Right then, on to the toy soldier stuff!

Having seen the splendid results achieved by a variety of other gamers using the dip (e.g. Phil Hendry, Saxon Dog, etc) I thought I'd give it a whirl for getting my Saga warbands ready for action. I had a few plastic Gripping Beast Vikings ready so I sprayed them white and set to. Here they are.

and

The armour was painted black then thoroughly drybrushed with GW Mithril Silver until it was really silver (as advised by Phil - thanks). The flesh was painted in GW Dwarf Flesh then very quickly highlighted with Found Base Sand Light. Everything else was mainly a Foundry 'light' shade with a few GW browns - no highlights.

Then I brushed on the dip, ensuring that it did not pool anywhere on the figure. Give the dip 24 hours to dry properly before spraying with a good quality matt varnish. It was at this point that I had a few problems with the cold, damp weather. The figures went cloudy!!!

Top tip - if figures go cloudy then re-spray with a gloss varnish.

I eventually got the spray to work ok (by doing it indoors!). In future, if the weather is anything but warm and dry then I'll use a brush on matt varnish instead. After that I did some very quick highlights (and I do mean quick) of some of the base colours, i.e. red, green, boneyard, etc. The great part is that the dip shows you exactly where the highlight is required, plus it really makes the figures look less dipped, and the highlights give the colours more depth. I'm quite pleased with the results. Hope you like them too.